A Camera App that Gets to Know Your Friends

A Camera App that Gets to Know Your Friends

Point and recognize: Klik, a smart-phone app from Face.com, uses facial recognition technology to find your friends in photos. If it’s not sure who the subject is, you can teach it, as shown here.

For a couple of years, Face.com has offered websites and apps a facial-recognition service that can identify people in photographs, figure out how many faces there are in the picture, which is male or female, and how old they might be. Facebook is widely believed to be one of its customers, though Face.com refuses to comment on their relationship.

But with mobile photo sharing gaining popularity, Face.com CEO Gil Hirsch says the company—which started out by building face-finding and -tagging Facebook apps—wanted to build a mobile app that, unlike existing apps that use the company’s technology, would give users real-time feedback about who their cell-phone camera is pointed at. It has done so with Klik, a free smart-phone camera app with the ability to recognize faces in real time and, if it can’t recognize them, learn who it is you’re shooting.

Originally released in January, the latest version of Klik rolled out on Thursday for the iPhone (an Android version is coming, but Face.com won’t say when). It’s a bit like Instagram, but with an AI twist.

Klik connects to your Facebook account and scans tagged photos of your friends, a process that can take a few hours. Once it’s ready, though, Klik can determine who you’re looking at before you’ve pressed the shutter. It also recognizes faces in photos that are already stored on your phone.

You can take photos, dress them up with simple filters, annotate them with messages and location data, and share them on Facebook or Twitter, through e-mail, or with other Klik users.

Hirsch can think of all kinds of applications for his company’s facial-recognition technology, from organizing family photos to enabling a service that could tell you more about whoever is standing in front of you.

Basically, Hirsch says, Klik picks up the presence of faces on the screen by scanning the video feed on the phone, frame by frame and pixel by pixel, searching for specific patterns it thinks make up a face. It tracks the face so it can still identify it even if it’s in profile. Klik sends that visual data to the company’s servers for processing, and returns with its best guess as to who’s in the picture.